Daily Archives: August, 16, 2009

The White House has admitted that it erroneously sent out hundreds, perhaps thousands of unsolicited emails to people who had not signed up to be on Obama’s email list.

The White House said Sunday night that it will change its e-mail sign-up procedures after some recipients of a health-care e-mail complained that they had not asked to receive updates.

“We are implementing measures to make subscribing to e-mails clearer, including preventing advocacy organizations from signing people up to our lists without their permission when they deliver petition signatures and other messages on individual’s behalf,” spokesman Nick Shapiro said in a statement Sunday night.

It’s bad enough that they are politicizing the White House to the degree that they are, but to spam people who don’t even want to see their propaganda, and belittle Major Garrett for asking about it…disgusting!

Now I’m no e-mail guru like David Axelrod, whose company ASK Public Stgrategies was once called “the gold standard in AstroTurf organizing”, but this explanation doesn’t smell right to me. Normally, you can’t get on an e-mail list unless you specifically sign up for it. Merely sending a comment to a web site, with your e-mail attached to it, does not put you on that site’s mailing list (this blog is an excellent example of how that works, as are most other blogs).That’s true even if someone else posts your comment with your address. It doesn’t matter who puts your information there, unless there is a specific opt-in procedure, the site is engaging in shady spammer practices.

Did Major Garrett Break the White House Email?

Fox News has posted several breathless updates to the story, including a statement, yesterday, from the White House. As I caught up on this story, I realized that I hadn’t gotten any emails from the White House since 5:25 pm yesterday.

Is it possible that the White House has frozen outgoing emails while it investigates this story? I emailed them to find out, but I haven’t heard back!

“The fact of the matter is there are not the votes in the United States Senate for the public option. There never have been,” he said. “So to continue to chase that rabbit I think is just a wasted effort.”

Conrad and other negotiators on the finance committee are instead pushing a system of nonprofit insurance cooperatives, as an alternative to the public plan.

“Co-ops are very prevalent in our society,” Conrad said. “They’ve been a very successful business model.”

“If it’s a co-op model, I suspect if it was sufficiently independent of government to make Republicans happy, the Democrats wouldn’t be happy,” Tanner told CNSNews.com. “The left wing of the Democratic Party would walk away, which is very insistent upon single payer, or certainly insisting on a robust public option and is not going to accept something watered down this much.”

The only rationale Democrats might have, then, for moderating their plans might be to “go far enough to make the [moderate Democrats] comfortable,” Tanner said. “[T]hat, I think, is their real target.”

“There’s no reason to do a co-op or any other option if it’s not somehow managed by government,” he said. “We have 1,300 insurance companies, and now we’d just have 1,350.”

Schumer seemed to concur, saying the plan would have to “achieve the same goals as a conventional public plan.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-NY, told reporters Thursday that a system of nonprofit cooperatives could pass as a “public option,” or government-run health care, depending on how they are set up.

“We’re going to have some type of public option, call it ‘co-op’, call it what you want,” Reid said, adding that Democrats are working on “some verison of a co-op that may satisfy everyone.”

I think we have to watch closely “how the co-ops are set up”, because we all know that the “same goals as a conventional public plan” would be a single payer health care system.

Basically, what the White House is doing is giving up the name “public option” and replacing it with the Orwellian “competition”. My guess is that the ruse will work for a little while, especially because few if any members of the MSM will call them on their ploy.

Secretary Sibelius is, as usual, wrong. You can turn things over to the private sector and get lower cost, better service, and more efficiency. The President already admitted that last week when he reminded us what a horrible operation the Post Office runs compared to FedEx and UPS. Perhaps the Secretary needs to pay more attention to what her boss is saying on the campaign trail.

No, the Democrats haven’t given up yet. They’re watching the polls tilt against them, so they’ve given up one meaningless set of provisions and stopped using the phrase “public option”. They haven’t given up their quest for government-run health care complete with rationing boards. They won’t give that dream up easily. It is, after all, the progressive Holy Grail.

MORE:

A couple of weeks ago, Gibby struggled to answer a simple question about the President’s stance on co-ops:

Do not believe that the public option is going away. Do not believe that the Democrats are going to give up on universal healthcare. They are not. They are going to change the language and keep the same goal and plan. It may take them longer, but they will continue pushing forward.

Now we are at the hour of danger. Republicans, wanting to appear reasonable, might cut a deal and go with co-ops. If they do, they are voting for a government take over of healthcare.

An administration official said tonight that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius “misspoke” when she told CNN this morning that a government run health insurance option “is not an essential part” of reform. This official asked not to be identified in exchange for providing clarity about the intentions of the President.

House Democratic officials say a public option will remain in their version of a health reform bill, even now that the White House has acknowledged it may be dropped later.

“This is just for the Senate,” a House leadership official said about the administration’s concession on a public option. “There is no way it passes the House the first time around without a public option.

If by health care “co-op,” Congress means allowing private associations to collectively buy health insurance for their members or operate a health insurance exchange, or allowing people to buy health insurance from a non-profit, member-owned private insurer, then those would be positive, pro-consumer developments.

However, simply slapping the word “cooperative” onto a new “insurer,” but then specifying that the government — not the policyholders — picks the board of directors (as Sen. Schumer wants), or that taxpayers will subsidize it, or that it has to pay doctors and hospitals at Medicare rates, would just be an exercise in trying to disguise a “public plan.”